Yangtse Incident

This adventure plays like a low-budget rehearsal for Robert Wise's 1966 epic The Sand Pebbles. It's a fact-based yarn about British warship HMS Amethyst, which sails up the Yangtse in 1949 intending to relieve the British embassy at Nanking. Instead, it comes under massive bombardment from Chinese communists, who blockade the river and trap the ship. Made less than ten years after Mao's revolution, one can't expect an analysis of Chinese politics. What we get is standard British heroics from a crew commanded by Richard Todd, courtesy of an Eric Ambler script, and it's all efficiently handled by Michael Anderson, who'd directed Todd in The Dam Busters.